May good for bird watching

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT)

Published
8:00 pm EDT, Friday, May 9, 2008

It's the time of the year when the great annual flood of warblers -- small bright-colored birds that seem to never rest for more than a few seconds -- comes through the state. Some keep moving, nesting far north of here in the Canadian forests. Some take up residence in Connecticut for the summer.

"It's picking up," said Scott Heth, director of Sharon Audubon Center, a nature preserve owned by the National Audubon Society. "I've talked to a guy over in the Hudson Valley who said that now you can see 20 different species in a day, and that's pretty nice."

Officially, today is International Migratory Bird Day -- a day that since 1993 has been set aside to mark the extraordinary movement of birds across the New World continents. In some places to our south, it's past peak; up north, the high season may still be a week or two away. In Connecticut, the whole of May could arguably be called Migratory Bird Month.

One of the points of the day is to connect birds to habitat and conservation, said Susan Bonfield, executive director of International Bird Migration Day. This year's theme, "Tundra to Tropics," points out that for migrating birds, every stop along the way is important.

And for one of the warblers, the cerulean warbler, one of the most frequent stops is in Connecticut. It's becoming an increasingly important nest place for the bird, which has a bright blue back and a white front decorated with a necklace of black feathers.

It's a bird that, if not endangered, is in a steep decline in numbers.

"If we're not an internationally important area for these birds, we are continentally," said Patrick Comins, director of bird conservation for Audubon Connecticut, who works at the Bent of the River Audubon Center in Southbury.

Comins said cerulean warblers like a specific habitat for nesting -- mature forests, with tall trees and not a lot of brush underneath. And there are places like that in Connecticut. River Road in Kent is one of the best places in the state to see cerulean warblers. Another is the Housatonic State Forest in Sharon and Cornwall.

"They like large stands of forest and we still have them here," said Heth of the Sharon Audubon Center.

There are fewer stands of forest elsewhere. One reason the cerulean warbler is in decline in the Western Hemisphere is because one of its most favored nesting areas -- the tops of mountains in the Appalachian range -- is being sawn off for coal mining.

That argues for preserving the forests and open space in Connecticut. But Comins said along with land conservation, we should be thinking energy conservation. Use less power and there will be less need for coal. Then there will less call to scalp and flatten entire ridge lines, and cerulean warblers won't have to depend quite so much on Connecticut.